Theodora’s Tea Shop

PROLOGUE

It all began in a moonlit library. The little girl, not yet eleven, opened up the grimoire.

The book was a tattered thing of moth-wing dust and stained cloth, reeking a stale, antique-shop odour.

There was a slight damp to the mushroom-coloured paper.

She wrinkled her nose and hoisted the tome to better catch the light.

How it was heavy. How the text was faded.

The window threw gaol-bar shadows upon the pages, and the girl squirmed to dodge the bands of darkness.

Spells for memory loss, the Nine Herbs Charm, Sympathetic magic, the hierarchy of spirits.

She flicked all the way to the end before returning, at last, to the spell she had chosen.

A sharp thud cut through the night. Her eyes darted about the space, yet nothing was amiss. She listened to the darkness with a quickened heart and resolved that the noise had simply been the aural cues of sleep committed by her mother or father in the next room over.

The little girl returned to her book.

Her father had been the one to purchase the grimoire.

From the chap in accounts, he had said the day before, eyes glinting. They were the same as hers: dark, round and with a fringe of raven-black lashes that matched her eyebrows and hair. He’d winked, then whispered: Don’t tell your mother.

The girl had giggled and popped a marmalade-smeared crumpet into her mouth.

That had been the final moment of warmth before the events of that afternoon.

Before she decided to end her childhood.

A violent scraping sounded behind her. She jerked around but it was only the willow outside, dragging its claws across the window.

The autumn had made the willows stark, skinny, sharp to the touch with guillotine branches.

The girl let out a breath. Yet, with each transpiring second, the shadows about the room lengthened.

Now, the coat rack in the corner took on the appearance of a daemonic figure, leering; the blanket thrown over the far bench caught the light in awkward folds and transformed into a cruel mouth, smirking.

The girl closed her eyes.

She heard her parents’ bodies stir. Even as they dreamed, perhaps the far reaches of their faculties could sense that something terrible was about to happen to their only daughter.

Will they miss me? the little girl wondered as she stared at the inky illustrations of witches etched upon the page.

Her mother would, perhaps. Her father? He, as likely as not, would buy a new record for the gramophone and take to dancing in the evenings again.

She imagined their living room illuminated by the gas lamps, the warbling sound of clarinets joined by the bouncing of slippered feet upon the rug.

He used to hold her hands and bob about with her. Never again.

The spell she had chosen did not require lemon myrtle nor mugwort nor hemlock. It did not request the crushing of beetles’ legs nor the burying of the skull of a cat. This spell had one ingredient – and, for it, she needed a knife.

She left the grimoire beside the armchair and trotted down the hall to the kitchen, where she slid open the top drawer beside the stove.

She found the bread knife. It had specks of rust upon the handle and a smear of old cauliflower soup along the blade.

Her mother hadn’t washed it properly. She never did.

The girl hastened back to the little library, leaping up and onto the armchair, lest some monstrous hand reach out from under it and swipe at her ankles. She set the knife on the shelf beside her and returned to her tome.

Her mother cut hair in the village, but her father’s occupation was less tangible to her.

It was something to do with the telephone.

They’d had one installed in the kitchen: a black and silver thing, tall with a bulbous head and a hand-held mouthpiece her mother shouted into.

No one else on the street had one, which her father had proudly mentioned twice-weekly in the month after it was put in.

He made no secret of his ambition to have his daughter apprentice under him.

But I don’t want to make telephones or put in telephones or talk into telephones all day, she had said with the true earnestness of a ten-year-old, sitting at the table with her craft paper and watercolours.

Her father had merely chuckled as if she were missing something quite obvious.

It wasn’t until that afternoon – after her long-awaited visit to the office and her father’s proclamation in front of the staff, the tittering from the secretaries and the little name tag drawn by the matronly assistant which had been pinned to the girl’s lapel and had made her feel like a spectacle – that she had put her foot down and shouted at him.

In front of his boss and the chap from accounts.

Her father had not liked that.

The girl sniffled at the memory. She watched the gleam of her reflection in the silver of the bread knife.

She saw her melancholy features, warped slightly by the metal.

How vulnerable she looked; how fragile and pathetic.

She hardened at that vision, until all that was left was a blank face, the bruises now forming around those dark eyes.

Outside, the moon’s glow was swept away by a curtain of clouds.

In a hoarse little voice, she whispered:

In thunder, lightning or in rain,

I call thee magic kin of yonder.

Free me from this caged mundane,

I yearn to be entrapped no longer.

And she drove the bread knife across her hand.

A clap of thunder tore through the night.

In the room beside the library nook, her father’s eyes flew open.

He knew. He felt regret before he felt fear.

Shame was heavy in his belly, but he ran.

He cried out his daughter’s name as he darted down the hall to where the little girl was meant to be sleeping.

Her bedroom was empty.

He charged back through the cottage to the little library.

The grimoire, pattered with blood and broken window glass, lay open on the floor. In blew an unearthly breeze and the fading ring of wind chimes and children’s chanting. The room smelled of woodsmoke, incense, gunpowder and lilac.

The little girl was gone.